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Friday 5 December 2008

The Uncommon Reader

Waking up late at the Palace

The Uncommon Reader
by Alan Bennett

At one point, early on, HM plucks from the mobile library a work by Ivy Compton-Burnett. She recalls making her a dame. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I remember that hair, a roll like a pie-crust that went right round her head.’ I don’t buy that for a second as the sort of remark the Queen would make — pie-crust? — but (imagine it read in his voice) it is immaculately Alan-Bennettish.

Likewise, later, addressing the Privy Council: ‘One has waded through excrement and gore; to be Queen, I have often thought, the one essential item of equipment a pair of thigh-length boots.’ That construction — the trailing qualifying clause with the verb ‘to be’ elided — is an absolute stick-of-rock hallmark of Bennett’s style. Two paragraphs later she’s at it again: ‘Sometimes one has felt like a scented candle, sent in to perfume a regime, or aerate a policy, monarchy these days just a government-issue deodorant.’

I remember noticing this process of Bennettisation most starkly in his memoir of his cancer, collected in Untold Stories. It was called ‘An Average Rock Bun’, supposedly because this was the image Bennett’s colonoscopist hit on to explain to him how big his tumour was.

How many rock buns do you see around the place these days? How many medical professionals do you imagine would find the rock bun their first metaphorical resort when announcing a potentially fatal condition to a patient? And what are the chances that one of those would happen to be dancing attendance on a man whose imaginative world happens to be infested by powdery old maids and northern tea-shops? It would be impertinent, both in its sense of irrelevance and of insolence, to say that this story was untrue. But it would be truthful to say that I didn’t believe it. It was too good, too perfectly Bennettish, to sound true. If he’d wanted verisimilitude, regardless of what the surgeon actually said, he should have gone for ‘tennis ball’.

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